i just got my turbo replaced under warranty

[92683]

so recently i just got a check engine light on my 2015 s3. scanned it and it came up with: p0303, p0304, p0300, p0302

i had no idea what was causing it nor did i want to try to find out myself. so i figured its still under warranty and called up my local tech to find out whats up. i didnt want to drive it there so i got it flat bedded to the dealership service department. they did some tests.

at this point i just got the car back from getting the infamous coolant leak issue fixed. it was leaking since day one and after 3 years they did it under warranty. it was the thermo housing leaking coolant.

so this time i had no idea. the car didnt have any ecu tune. it was pretty much stock other than some bolt on's. minor parts like inter-cooler charger pipes and diverter valve. they did some tests and figured it was either fuel pump, injectors, and some other items related to ignition.
they checked it all out and found nothing so they decided to change out the spark plugs. that actually helped but at the end of that installation the car still threw out some codes still. and with some other test they decided to test the turbo boost along with other things, the found the boost was not building up properly. they took apart the turbo at this point to find out that the shaft was loose. so i lucked out before it could actually get really bad. audi of america authorized it after all the proof was proven by the dealership. so i here i am with the newest version of the turbo as the tech told me. version H. he said there was a middle version as well but the H was remade to fix any future issues.

the car now drives with more crisp power down low. i didnt notice how bad it was before, i guess i just got used to the sluggish power i got. now it seems to build boost way down low faster as it should have. the engine sounds like its healthier. i cant tell up top power as i havent really pushed it on the top ranges but from a roll or slow move i can get it going with out flooring as much.

the take away from this is that if you tune it you wont see the problem coming. the tech told me that when you map the ecu with the new software it will over ride the safety and youll never see the this coming and boom you have a damaged engine. the turbo shaft will rub and flow into the engine chambers and your toast. at least thats what he has seen. personally i do like how the stock engine's power is. i was just sluggish before so im happy now.

 

[S3apr'd]

did you have any distinct noises that made you realise this was an issue or was it just the codes? I would be interested to know if you experience any different noises (or lack thereof) now that you have a new turbo.

 

[S3Fan]

Glad you got this fixed under warranty, does it show on the repair bill how much it would have cost had you paid out of of pocket? I

 

[92683]

did you have any distinct noises that made you realise this was an issue or was it just the codes? I would be interested to know if you experience any different noises (or lack thereof) now that you have a new turbo.

no noise. no signs of anything going on till it the cel came on.

now the car runs like it did right before but with consistent power. the power seems normal to me again. on light accelerations i can feel that it is not lagging as much but i also noticed before that the tail pipe got dirty fast. i dont clean it often so i cant tell if its still doing it. all stock exhaust parts.

i did like to do short burst of races with other cars on the road. i noticed before i couldnt even keep up with lightly moded mitsu evo's and such. the other day i was able to kinda keep up with an older bmw M5 for just a few secs. it was from a roll. i dont know the year exactly, not really familiar with bmw's. but he kept chirping through his manual gears up to about 50mph which is where traffic was getting heavy. i know he would have beaten me easy but for a few secs he was getting angry as he couldnt over take me as quickly as he would have expected. as for my side, right from the push i noticed my transmission clutch could do better if it had an upgraded tcu tune to have the clutch hold harder as it felt alot of slip. but im not sure if it is slipping and i have no way to test to see if if it is having the popular issue many others have experienced because i dont do launch control which seems to bring out the dsg issues quicker.

Glad you got this fixed under warranty, does it show on the repair bill how much it would have cost had you paid out of of pocket? I

no price but he did say it could have been expensive at around 3-4k just for the stock turbo and you would add hours of labor on top of that plus supporting parts. the problem was the shaft was getting loose and if the blades did touch the sides it would have gone into the motor and cause damage. he says a lot of the tuned cars have been damaged this way. i asked how? wouldn't the cel light come up and they could have fixed it like how my cel warned me?
he said no!.

remapping the ecu aka tuning, the ecu would have pushed the car to go harder. = which meant the issue would have shown its self earlier, as many have experienced at around a few thousand miles after their "stage I or stage II" installs. it makes the turbo that was defective go out earlier. not all cars had defective turbos so this issue was intermittent. fyi,there is a second generation of turbo's released since the original 2015 ones. this should have fixed all issues with the turbo. i got the newest variant.

the second part to this is the ecu, as a norm, monitors everything but when they remap it the parameters to monitor is turn off. therefore, the ecu no longer does its job to show a cel when there is a problem. why do they do this, if tuners didnt do this the altered mapping of the ecu would constantly show a cel because their maps does make the car go out of range for performance. such as turn off the cel for o2 sensors. so in the end the owner of the car never sees warning cels. hence why we see those notorious failures engine failures after a stage install.
in a nutshell, they turned off safety monitoring systems to allow their mapping to work, and customers dont know this.

this brings up the idea of warranty from tuner companies as well. should places like APR and others cover this sort of issue?
why ask this? well the dealership sees this and knew about this issue right away, maybe back in 2015ish. its about the end of 2018 and im sure companies like APR should know this more than anyone at the same time dealerships found out but they still have not warned customers. the things they did come up with are in the warranty disclosure about not warranting their "tune" and im sure they had a ton of users contact them about failures around 2015. the defective turbo's were also known to them around the same time, this can be found on forums.

here are the questions;
1. right at the moment when companies like APR find out issues should they directly warn customers about how defective turbo failures are real from audi before buying their product?
basically educate the community.
(currently they dont say a word when you buy. only their warranty brochures describes how they dont warranty anything and its all up to the customer but nothing about the process. also customers are just excited about going stage II or I)
2. should they be required to tell customers that their warning system is turned off when remapped?
3. should they pay for damaged cars that were caused by their "tunes" even after they found out about defective turbo's because their system didnt allow customers to even see the warning cel?